As plenty of parents can attest, talk has been swirling about pre-K and middle-school appeals, and second round applications for pre-K. Here's the latest:



Appeals for pre-K are due to the DOE by next Friday, June 13. These appeals are meant to address clerical/record-keeping issues, like address changes, name misspellings, etc. These are NOT for parents who wish to appeal their child's exclusion from pre-K.

If you feel your child was wrongly placed or simply excluded from your zoned school, write the DOE's OSEPO office at Tweed pronto, if you haven't already. There is no hard deadline for these letters, but their aim is to resolve all open queries before the round-two pre-K apps begin on June 23d.

To participate in the second round of pre-K admissions, get hold of an application from your borough OSEPO office. Parents seeking sibling priority seats should receive them by mail from the DOE. (Be good enough, readers, to let us know if and when the 2nd round applications arrive -- thanks.) The second round begins on June 23d; there is no deadline yet set for that process, although one will be decided soon (says the DOE) and posted here, of course, and on their site.

Caveat emptor, parents: If you elect to participate in round two and are granted a pre-K seat, you are obliged to accept that seat for your child. In other words, you can't hold on to a first-round placement in hopes of another, somehow better second placement. If your bid's in the ring, you have to accept the outcome. Fair's fair.

On middle schools, elementary schools in districts with appeals processes have, apparently, distributed appeals information. (Help us out again, here, readers: What's in your child's backpack?)

If your 5th-grader applied to a middle school in another district, contact the out-of-district school's guidance counselor for appeals particulars. If you're still unable to resolve your concerns, contact yourborough OSEPO office -- be patient, be prepared for some phone tag, but be persistent, too. Remember, not all districts have formal appeals processes. (In this case, fair's not exactly fair.)

Parents in Brooklyn and elsewhere say some of their fifth-graders didn't get any place at all in middle school, or got placed at schools they didn't include on their applications. If this is true for your child, let us know -- getting a sense of the scope of the challenge is the first step.